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know the news is several days old now, but can we just pause for
a second to acknowledge the amazing fact that President George W.
Bush has pulled out of the ABM Treaty? I mean, he just said, “See
ya.” He said, “We’re leavin’. Thanks, guys.
Been a great 30 years (actually not). But we have to defend this
country, and we can’t let a piece of paper that was always
flawed — and that just happens to have been signed with a state
that no longer exists — get in our way.”
Candidate Bush
had talked about giving our six months’ notice to Moscow. He’d
said, “When and if we bump up against that treaty, we’re
going to have to give our notice, because the protection of this
country from missile attack is the main thing.” He also said
that we’d reform Social Security. But sayin’ and doin’
are two separate things, and many of us feared that the ABM Treaty
would be with us as long as death, taxes, and Mary Frances Berry’s
rule of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.
But Bush went
ahead and did it — said, “See ya.” Before we
move on with life — and Lord knows we’ve got a lot to
deal with — we should just acknowledge that awesome, head-shaking
fact. I mean, not even Reagan did it — and he could
have. Bush is, indeed, “A Different Kind of Leader,” as
the old political slogan goes.
 One
cool thing now is that the Democrats have to come off as more pro-Russian
than the Russians. Does it occur to you that Sen. Biden, Sen. Levin,
and the like appear more pro-Russian than Vladimir Putin and his
government? And if you were a Democrat, wouldn’t you be kinda-sorta
embarrassed?
It’s a
little like “bombing during Ramadan”: Look, the Muslims
do it; have for years. Why should the American government be more
pro-Muslim than the Muslims? Why should the foreign-policy leaders
of the Democratic party be more concerned about the feelings of
the Russians than the Russians?
If we are to
be allies — and I’m talking about the U.S. and Russia,
not the Republican party and the Democratic party — we should
by no means fear a defensive system. It is time — “past
time,” as political speechwriters for some reason love to say
— to build.
Good
to see that Bush has retained his sense of humor — that he
remains himself. Did you catch what he said to Terry McAuliffe —
“The Mac,” as he calls himself (really) — when McAuliffe
went through a reception line at the White House? (“The Mac,”
remember, is the old Clinton money-man and sidekick, and now chairman
of the Democratic National Committee.) Bush said, “Welcome
back to the White House. Try not to steal the silverware.”
Really, you
gotta love him. You don’t, of course. But I do, put
it that way.
Last
week, Sen. Chuck Schumer argued for ever-bigger government, calling
for a “new New Deal.” Sorry, babe, but that line’s
been taken — by (among others, presumably) George W. Bush.
When he was a candidate — going down the stretch before November
7, ’00 — he described his Social Security reform as a
“new New Deal for America’s workers.” One of FDR’s
grandsons stood with him in support of that reform.
Which, by the
way, where is it? Come on, Captain Courageous: If you can pull out
of the ABM Treaty, you can do this. Posterity, with their prosperity,
will thank you.
I
bring you some news from hip New York — that is, from a hip
eating/drinking place that I happened to stop into (had to go to
the john — they let me; new spirit here, maybe). Many have
been saying there’s been a tremendous change after 9/11, that
the country’s different. Some say that the country has actually
been revealed, drawn out; others that the country has changed
fundamentally. Whatever. And who knows how long it’ll last?
But I’m
not interested in all that right now. Back to that john: In there,
there was a prominent sign that said, “In God We Trust. United
We Stand.” So what? you say. Awfully commonplace.
No, no: Not
here, not in that spot, trust me. The idea of God invoked like that,
in an establishment like that, was mind-boggling to me, and immensely
heartening. A little earnestness and faith is such a joy after a
long season of irony, cynicism, and smugness.
No, I don’t
think a smidgen of good has come out of those horrible events:
I think it’s all evil, and I recoil at silver-lining-ism.
But I was glad
to have stopped in that men’s room, is all I’m saying.
To have those words on one’s coins is one thing (who looks?);
to have them up on that tiled wall is very much another.
I
have picked before — and very recently — on King County,
Washington, a very p.c. place. They’re terrible Castro-lovers.
And now they’ve banned “Merry Christmas,” more or
less. That is, King County executive Ron Sims sent a memo to all
county workers urging them to do “Happy Holidays,” never
“Merry Christmas” — so as to be “respectful,
inclusive.”
I don’t
really mean to knock this at the moment (well, I pretty much do,
but hang with me for a second). It’s just that this little
news nugget brought a memory. I was working for a large firm, that
was very conventional: p.c., “appropriate behavior,” all
liberal Democrats, the whole bitsy (as my grandmother would say).
And all December long, it was “Happy Holidays, Happy Holidays,
Happy Holidays,” in chirpy voices, until you wanted to cut
your ears off.
One day —
round about Dec. 20 — I was chatting with a dear friend and
co-worker: not a right-winger, by any means, but a marvelous guy,
hugely sensitive, with a deep understanding. I said to him, fairly
quietly, smilingly, “Merry Christmas.” Those words sounded
so weird. So subversive in that environment! He returned
— also smiling broadly — “Merry Christmas.”
We stood grinning at each other like a couple of idiots. Felt like
we were passing samizdat in the old USSR or something.
I just love
that memory.
Some
people are a little annoyed with those of us -wingers who’ve
portrayed the traitor John Walker — or whatever he’s calling
himself at the moment — as a product of his liberal, New Agey,
Marin County, anything-goes, Malcolm X-assigning environment. The
Washington Post’s Richard Cohen wrote a
typically stylish column saying, Gee, one guy, out of
a nation of hundreds of millions, and the Right’s all hot to
damn liberalism.
This argument
sounds clever and decisive — until you think about it for about
three seconds. Now, it’s not just John Walker, and his lonely
joining-up with the Taliban. It’s all those, in California
and elsewhere, who’ve been excusing him, rationalizing him,
apologizing for him, defending him. That’s what we’re
talking about, along with our Johnny. It’s not just one, poor,
misguided kook; it’s the culture — or subculture, if you
feel like being optimistic (from the conservative point of view)
— that supports him.
Nice try, though.
Look: I’m
about 90 percent certain that John Walker was never, ever taught
why America is good — just about uniquely good, in fact —
and worth defending. Why? Because I wasn’t, much, in
my formal education (hometown: Ann Arbor, Mich.). I was taught,
essentially, that America was racist, arrogant, destructive, insensitive,
belligerent, reckless, undemocratic, imperialist, and poisonous.
Who wouldn’t want to take up arms against a country like that?
Every
other day or so, I glimpse an interview with a Palestinian in the
street, and the guy is saying, “The rest of the world thinks
we’re all terrorists. It’s so unfair. It’s so unjust.
It’s so stereotypical. It’s so awful.”
One’s
heart goes out. But when Palestinian terrorists strike, massacring
innocents, does the guy — do the guys — say, “Damn
those terrorists! Damn them for doing what they do, for giving us
all a bad name, for blackening our reputation, for impeding our
progress. Let’s get them, and stop them from continuing to
disadvantage us.”
Oh, no. Oh,
no. The guy, or guys, are more likely to be out in the street whooping
it up, celebrating. And the more subdued, with microphones in their
faces, will defend and justify the murders.
They shouldn’t
be allowed to have it both ways. Don’t want to be tarred with
terrorism, or with association with it? Great. Deplore it, revile
it, contribute what you can to stop it, to delegitimize it.
Thinking
about the political situation in the Middle East is just about the
most depressing thing you can do. The regimes, some of us have long
figured, are — sadly, horrifyingly — better than the
people. (The other way to put that is, The people are worse
than the regimes.) Fouad Ajami speaks of a “thin layer”
of ruling elites that holds at bay a seething, hateful populace.
You recall the millions out in the streets for the mullahs in Iran.
(Remember when they knocked Khomeini’s corpse off the bier?
That was so cool.) The “Palestinian street” usually
seems worse than Arafat. And so it is in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere.
But who knows?
The Arabs, as individuals, as people, never get to talk. They never
get to vote, in free, fair, secret, genuine elections. They never
get to express themselves, never get a voice in their own destinies,
never get to choose. What would they do, with a curtain closed and
a decent choice? Vote for tyranny, and continual war with Israel,
aimed at that country’s elimination? Maybe. But we can’t
know: The Arabs don’t really get to talk.
And if they
made a peep for democracy in public, they wouldn’t last very
long.
I will repeat
here an old point: The fact that strongmen such as Hosni Mubarak
and the Assad family hold sham “elections,” that they
win with 98 percent, is a kind of perverted tribute to actual democracy.
There is a sense, there, that democracy is right. And wouldn’t
it be nice if an Arab somewhere — somewhere outside of Israel
or Dearborn — got a chance to participate in real democracy?
A
question of the hour has been, “Do Muslims ‘believe’
the tape or not?” A lot don’t — that was as predictable
as the sunrise. (Actually, that simile was as predictable as the
sunrise — sorry. I’m rushing, and couldn’t do better.)
A truth I — we — have learned from Bernard Lewis and David
Pryce-Jones stays with me: Arabs have a talent for projecting themselves
onto others. That is, they expect that you would do what
they would do, given your power, or circumstances, or whatever.
And in the Arab world, the truth — the factual, literal, straight,
truth: the truth truth — is not exactly the highest value.
How dare I
make such a horrible, sweeping statement, you say? Well, you could
look it up: It’d take a while.
Hearing charges
that the U.S. had doctored the tape, I immediately thought of the
fact that modern Arabs themselves have proven ardent doctorers:
You should see some of the films in the Egyptian military museum
in Cairo! They have a version of the ’73 war right out of a
crooked Hollywood studio, or Ollie Stone’s imagination.
And are we
Americans so immune to such a thing: to a charge of doctoring when
something valid appears that we don’t much like? Remember when
George Stephanopoulos charged that Gennifer Flowers had doctored
her tape proving that she and Candidate Clinton were more than jes’
friends? Ah, but Stephanopoulos is respectable now, and we’re
not supposed to dredge stuff like that up.
How it must
burn James Carville, Paul Begala, and Terry Lenzner, Stephanopoulos’s
late respectability! They knew him when, when he was one of them.
In a Times
article on do-the-Muslims-believe-or-don’t-they?, the Middle
East Studies guy John L. Esposito said that Muslims were suspicious
of the 9/11 charge — of the 9/11 fact — because Arabs
had been accused, wrongly, of doing Oklahoma City.
Some analysts
were, indeed, embarrassed when it turned out that a homegrown mass
murderer had done that, and not Arabs, as they had guessed, or reasoned.
But I could never be too hard on them. Why? Because many
Arab or Muslim groups contacted media outlets to claim credit for
the act. They lied that they had done it — that’s how
desperate they were to be thought responsible, how envious they
were of the real mass murderer, or murderers.
To have done
it, or to claim to have done it, to have wanted to do it —
what’s the difference, really?
So,
Anthony Lewis has retired, after 32 years of columnizing. He has
failed, in a way: Israel is still standing (though barely, you might
fear, or hope). Remember when he said that Israel was trying to
“exterminate” Palestinian nationalism? Nice word choice,
Tony. Also, the Republican party still exists. The Khmer Rouge is
gone, though. Lewis once called it “cultural arrogance”
to deplore the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power.
Lewis’s
America — as he proves in his
last column — is one in which the black night of fascism
is always descending, in which Susan Sontag or Noam Chomsky (or
Anthony Lewis?) is about to be gagged for incorrect thought. It
is an America with which I’m utterly unfamiliar; although I’ve
lived in it less long than Lewis. Maybe I’ve just been in the
wrong places.
Sad
news. Really, no kidding: very sad news: The Philadelphia cop-killer
Mumia Abu-Jamal has been made an honorary citizen of Paris. The
Paris City Council, in a thrust by Communists, bestowed the honor.
It is the first time a person has been made an honorary citizen
of the capital of France since Pablo Picasso 30 years ago. Abu-Jamal
is beloved by the Left because a) he killed a policeman and b) he
is handsome, charismatic, and articulate. Oh, and c) he’s black,
which helps a lot. In fact, it’s indispensable.
The man he
killed, Officer Daniel Faulkner, was white.
I do not take
this opportunity to be anti-French. Not at all. Americans are equally
guilty, as far as I’m concerned, in that Abu-Jamal has been
endlessly honored here, invited, for example, to give commencement
addresses (via video hook-up, from prison) at Evergreen State College
— a public institution in Washington — and Antioch College.
At Antioch, Officer Faulkner’s widow, Maureen — who was
there to protest — was jeered and taunted by the kids.
Thinking of
this, I cannot fault, uniquely, the French. Too many motes in American
eyes.
You
have read, maybe, that Janis Besler Heaphy, the publisher of the
Sacramento Bee, was booed at the mid-year graduation ceremony
of California State University, Sacramento. What’s noteworthy
about that? you say. Speakers on campus are booed all the time.
Yes, that’s
true. When I was in school — on three different campuses, I
believe — conservatives were horribly booed or heckled or otherwise
smothered, when they were invited to appear. A conservative who
could get through a speech was pretty much a unicorn — a mythical
creature — in my experience.
But the difference
at Cal State, Sacra., was that the kids were booing this lady for
going on and on about how this new war on terrorism threatened our
civil liberties.
I have two
quick thoughts on this: The first is, that the kids — in a
very healthy way — were sick of being lectured on this; that
they know full well that you can combat terror effectively, including
on the home front, and respect the Constitution. John Ashcroft,
in other words, is not an un-American villain, and many of us are
fed up to here with being told that he is.
The second
is: What a shame. I always wondered about liberals — honest
liberals, decent ones — Don’t they feel embarrassed
that conservatives can’t get a hearing on campus, thanks to
the leftists who shut them up? Well, they should’ve
been embarrassed.
And wouldn’t
it be lousy for “our” crowd to start doing it themselves?
I have a memory:
Jeane Kirkpatrick — maybe while she’s U.N. ambassador;
I can’t remember for sure — is speaking — or trying
to speak — at Berkeley. The kids won’t let her. So instead
of just standing there, continuing to try to speak over, or through,
the rowdies, as dumb conservatives always do, she just left. Walked
off. Said, “To hell with it.”
That was thrilling.
And maybe even a few of the kids were embarrassed. But maybe not.
A
beautiful flower bloomed a few days ago: Dissidents and human-rights
activists started the first-ever oppositionist website in Cuba.
But it was quickly destroyed: The Castro regime shut it down. And
no one but a few nuts in Miami — and bleeding, desperate, tortured
Cuba — cares.
(Memo to the
literalist and obtuse: That line up there, about “nuts in Miami,”
was meant to allude to the conventional left-liberal view.)
I have learned,
just in the last week, that two different university alumni associations
are offering happy tours to Cuba: the associations of the University
of Michigan and Barnard College. Also, the Third Annual U.S.-Cuba
Writers Conference will be held in Havana in March.
For tourists,
of course, there is a completely separate Cuba: separate hotels,
separate restaurants, separate hospitals, separate districts, separate
everything. A Cuban-American I know visited the country a couple
of summers ago, and stayed in a hotel-for-foreigners. Because he
looked Cuban (naturally), state security checked his ID — his
passport — every time he appeared. His cousins, when they came
to meet him, couldn’t wait for him in the lobby; had to wait
for him outside.
There is such
a thing as “medical tourism”: People from around the world,
particularly from the former USSR and South America, travel to the
island, receive their treatment at the foreigners hospitals, and
bask on the (foreigners-only) beaches. Meanwhile, Cuban doctors
who actually treat Cubans . . . well, the story is hideously grim,
as ample testimony has made clear.
Point is, Castro
craves the appearance of normalcy that the carefully Potemkinized
and Intouristed tourism provides.
To all those
alumni dupes (or Reds) and those “writers”: Screw you.
Some
of us talk about the Cuban political prisoners, the tortured, and
they’re apt to seem an amorphous, nameless, faceless lot. That’s
why I like to name them once in a while; I like merely to
roll the syllables of those names off my tongue — they are
not, altogether, forgotten.
There is a
political prisoner in the Guantanamo provincial prison, Company
1, Ward A-500. (The information comes from human-rights activists
in both Cuba and the United States.) His name is Ernesto Lucas Corral
Cabrera. He is 27 years old, and a democratic foe of the Castro
regime. He is deprived of all sunlight, and is repeatedly beaten.
A sufferer from arterial hypertension, he is denied the medical
treatment he requires. Because he mouths off about Castro —
and condemns his torturers — he is repeatedly hauled off to
the punishment cell. All of this is reminiscent of Armando Valladares’s
Gulag Archipelago for Cuba, Against All Hope.
Oh, and Corral
has a specific persecutor: one Captain Victor Reyes Cobas, a Castro
henchman.
All right,
then: That’s not much, but I just wanted to say those names,
victim and victimizer. There are so many prisoners. And they are
not faceless, nameless. Each one is a living, breathing,
wonderful person — better than us.
Well,
that’s not very cheery. But I will end. This’ll probably
be the last Impromptus of 2001. In response to previous columns,
I received a large amount of mail, especially regarding Hampshire
College, the attitude of Europeans toward Americans, and Christmas
albums. I hope to publish a sample of this mail later.
In the meantime,
God bless you, every one. (Not an original line, but zingy, isn’t
it?)
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